This historian dug into old records and found a lost chapter of Chicano L.A. music culture

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One day in December 2022, Ruben Molina — DJ, record collector, and community historian — received a call about a collection of 78rpm records in Azusa.What awaited him weren’t just slabs of fragile shellac, many scarred with scratches: “These were all from 1953-55, all early rhythm and blues, and the sleeves were tagged up with neighborhood and school club names,” he explained.

These tags, left on fading labels and torn record sleeves, can be found on countless singles and albums from the era, informal markers of who people were and where they came from.As Molina learned, the collection belonged to the late Julia Juarez, a member of the Rhythm-Aires, a trio of teenage Chicanas from Azusa who threw parties in the early ’50s.On one yellowed sleeve, he found a hand-drawn Rhythm-Aires logo, surrounded by a roll-call of friends nicknamed after their neighborhoods: “Kenny De Ontario,” “Victor De Pomona,” “Annie-Lara De Chino.” USC journalism professor and longtime record collector Oscar Garza describes these markings as “Chicano hieroglyphics… a reflection of the friends who shared the memories of that song or album.” Molina saw the records and their scrawls as street-level snapshots of Mexican American youth life: “stories from the bottom up,” as he describes.

They directly inspired his latest book: “The Dreamy Side: Rhythm & Blues and Chicano Culture in 1950s Los Angeles.”Across its 140-plus pages, the book traces a postwar landscape of Chicano youth culture through personal essays, interview testimonials, and over a hundred vintage photos, party ads, and scans of record labels and album covers, many with those tags.As with Molina’s previous books, including his groundbreaking “Chicano Soul: Recordings and History of an American Culture” (2007), “The Dreamy Side” offers an alternate approach to local Chicano cultural history.

Univ...